I grew up in Chelsea and Newton, Mass. and now make my home in Arlington. I taught high school in Haverhill and Burlington until 2007, and have been a writer for about as long as I was a teacher. Maybe longer. While much of my writing is business-
...

I grew up in Chelsea and Newton, Mass. and now make my home in Arlington. I taught high school in Haverhill and Burlington until 2007, and have been a writer for about as long as I was a teacher. Maybe longer. While much of my writing is business-related, I also write whenever I travel and I travel whenever I can.

Our helicopter delivers us to the glacier early in the morning. (Notice how nonchalantly I say that. Three days ago I’d never been on a helicopter and was terrified. Now it’s just another form of transportation.)

It is cloudy and snowy and sleety and raw (in late summer). I zip my parka (provided by Canadian Mountain Holidays) and head onto the ice, awaiting others. I have a chance to watch the next flight come in for a landing (above) and leave to pick up the last group (below). This photo of the helicopter silhouetted against the cloud cover, above the rounded mountaintops and uneven glacier, has always been a favorite...something about the ancient and seemingly immutable natural background and the relatively tiny human device flying over it.

Sense of Vast Space Where Mountains Meet Clouds

I always thought glaciers were smooth, cool ice with lots of ‘glacial’ blue that was a product of the weight and compression of the frozen water molecules. There’s blue--that’s about all I got right. As we make our way along the glacier I am filled with wonder.

Glaciers pick up pieces of the earth they traverse, and then drop them as they move, leaving 'moraine' behind, usually along the edge of the ice. The uneven ice surface is filled with rocks and dirt; with cracks and rivulets; with deep holes (millwells) that were started by sun-warmed stones and then expanded by flowing water; with crevasses created when the glacier moved over underlying uneven terrain.

Crevasses are deep, wedge-shaped fissures as wide as sixty or seventy feet and up to one hundred fifty feet deep Yes... 1-5-0 feet deep. I am remembering the story of a hiker who fell into a crevasse that had been concealed by freshly fallen snow. Below is the photo that the hiker, Ronald Wielkopolski, took from inside the crevasse, looking up. (To read more about Mr Wielkopolski's crevasse visit, please visit http://tinyurl.com/CrevasseFall ). Below that view is the photo I take from outside a crevasse, which is where I intend to stay.

from inside a crevasse!

Just for the record--- the picture below is from the point where the crevasse is widest. When I cross, I do so at the same point as my friends... where it’s quite narrow and I can’t fall in. (whew)